Not Able to Impose Literacy Testing for Voting – Kentucky to Impose Literacy Tests for Health Care

Going After Low Income Folks One Barrier at a Time

Kentucky wants to keep low income people off of health care. Well not Kentucky per se, it's the ultra conservative Governor and the Republicans who will stop at no cruelty in order to punish low income people. See in their minds poverty is the result of poor character, and the low income people, particularly the ones that need health care and cannot afford it are the lowest of them all.

So Kentucky is getting permission to impose work requirements on receiving Medicaid, never mind that many able bodied recipients are already working and those that are not are typically unable to physically do so. Now they want to add a health literacy test to the equation.

Kentucky says the courses, along with the bigger elements of the recently approved waiver it received from federal Medicaid rules, will help to “empower individuals to improve their health.”

A leading health experts says it better than we can.

“If these topics are taught at all in primary education, they certainly aren’t addressed consistently or in an evidence-based way,” said Harold Pollack, a professor at the University of Chicago who was a co-author of a book on basic financial education. “But singling out the Medicaid population for classes as a condition for access to insurance suggests that shrinking and stigmatizing the program, not literacy, is the goal.”

Conservatives probably agree, after all that is their intent. Kentucky conservatives, setting the standard for cruelty for the 21^st century.